


Magnetic North

by PositivelyVexed



Category: Dark Matter - Michelle Paver
Genre: Angst, Dreams, Ghosts, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 13:59:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12459240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PositivelyVexed/pseuds/PositivelyVexed
Summary: Jack makes a yearly pilgrimmage.





	Magnetic North

**Author's Note:**

  * For [within_a_dream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/gifts).



_November 25_

Today is the anniversary of Gus’s death, or so I thought this morning. No, it still is, that much hasn’t changed, but it feels strange to call it so now that

No. Collect yourself and tell it right. You’re getting ahead of yourself.

I made the melancholy walk down to the beach at midday, when the sun was at its brightest, the trees alive with activity: lizards scuttling and birds hopping from branch to branch and insects buzzing in the air. There is life here, it said. Each sound an rebuff against the dark I came to commune with.

I brought along a bottle of Irish whiskey, a tradition I’ve kept up through the years. It’s the same brand we drank in Gruhuken. They don’t sell it in Jamaica, but Algie sends me a bottle every Christmas, and I save it up all year for this occasion. I poured out two drinks in a metal tumbler and toasted him. I threw back one tumbler, let it burn a straight line down my throat, and poured the other one out in the sand. It was peaceful, sunny, fragrant. The arctic felt far away, and I remember having the thought that maybe one day I would be able to make this walk without any fear in my heart at all. I watched a flock of birds disappear beyond the horizon, heading south.

I knelt in the sand. Ten years of manoeuvring crutch and prosthesis hasn’t made this sort of movement any easier, but I did it. I wanted to put my hand in the water. 

It heartened me that I felt nothing but warmth, and the gentle tug of the current, like the pulse of a heartbeat.

I sat for a moment, trying to think what to say to Gus.

The things you say, I suppose: I miss you. I still think of you. I revisit my memories and try to keep them pristine and neat, like a room in perfect order: the way you looked out to sea like a painting of some founding hero, the way you'd delight in the minutia and variety of life, crawling on your knees to find samples of plants among the cliff wall cracks, the way you made your bed every morning with military precision and boyish glee. The thought of losing any of it is unbearable, like I will have let another part of you slide away, like a piece of glacier sloughing off and falling below the freezing waters of the Arctic. All this passed through my mind and never reached my lips. Even here, thousands of miles away, the fear that something will hear me and exact a terrible price for my indiscretion if I say such things out loud has never left me.

In ten years, I’ve never said the words I said aloud, to an absent Gus, in the cabin in Gruhuken, when I thought I was being brave. It’s like they’ve been burned out me. Anyway, needless to say, there’s been no other person to say it to.

I withdrew my hand from the water, my wet hand cold and somehow bereft, like I'd let go of an embrace, and hobbled into a standing position. As I searched the shoreline for Isaak, I became aware that the current had drawn back behind me. The tide here is usually gentle, but sometimes the currents of the tide interact in just such a way to produce real waves. It was so now, and the water rushed in around me before I could get out of the way, lapping up to my knees. The force of it nearly knocked me to my knees, and I felt a momentary horror, struck with a foolish fancy that it was a hand trying to grab me and pull me back in. Then, just as quickly, the water retreated and was mellow as a summer morning again. It took me a moment to notice that the tide had left something hard and shining against my good foot.

A glass bottle, a cork snug in place at the opening. Empty, I thought at first, but as I jostled the bottle with my foot, a roll of paper tumbled around inside.

A message in a bottle. I was struck for a moment by the picturesque novelty of it. The kind of thing you read about in the pulp stories with castaways on desert islands. In Boy’s Own adventure stories.

That thought made my chest tighten like a screw inside me.

I guided the bottle off my foot, feeling better once it was no longer touching me. The outside of it was cloudy and barnacled. There were the faint traces of soot on the inside, like it had been through a fire. I realized I knew the shape of the bottle.

I could have walked away and left it, but I didn’t. I can't say why. I think because it was a letter, and I felt certain it could not write. But he could. I picked it up and worked the cork out of it. The sweet smell inside hit me—it was a syrup bottle. Golden Syrup. The kind we had used to sweeten our porridge in Gruhuken.

No matter my fear, I was drawn to it, like a compass needle on a spindle. Gus, my magnetic north.

I prised the paper out with my fingers, and unrolled it carefully, my heart pounding so hard the waves were momentarily drowned out. Isaak had appeared at some point and stood silent, ears perked up. I scarcely noticed. Everything was forgotten but that cold brittle sheet of paper, kept dry even as it was borne across the ocean. It too showed signs of fire, singed around the edges. It was a page torn out of a book.

I knew it. It was a page torn from Gus’s book on Spitsbergen, the one I had turned to for information about the place I found myself trapped alone, during that endless night after the others had left. I had forgotten about it entirely until now, but I recognized it immediately and without surprise. It was a page from the chapter on Svalbard folklore.

I turned it over. 

There was nothing written on it. I didn’t realize how high my heart had caught in my throat until it dropped. I turned it over again feverishly, not believing it. There was nothing else but lifeless printed words and sooty smudges all over the page. What did it mean? I felt chilled, like an wind had blown open a door in the air and let in something frigid. I didn’t realize my legs had given out until I landed on the sand. 

It was while I sat half-crumpled in the sand that I saw something in the corner of the page, some preamble about the character of Spitbsergen, that accounted for its folklore. I'd skipped past it before, taking it for irrelevant dross. There were a few words that had been underlined neatly by one of Gus’s water resistant pencils. I imagined Gus reading the page closely, and underlining it because he admired the sentiment, the same way he was taken with the sentiment of Gruhuken as an untouched place that no one had been to before us.

_It has often been noted that dominant emotion of the place is one of melancholy loneliness. If one can bear it, one will be rewarded with striking beauty. It is often said that the man who can stand such a trade-off regrets nothing._

The words “regrets nothing” had a few thick lines drawn underneath them. It was heartbreaking to think of Gus appreciatively underlining those words in the cabin or even more innocently on our ship or in Tromsø, of him returning to them as the endless night closed in around us, as the fear and the nightmares shook his resolve.

I scanned the page for any other evidence of Gus’s handiwork, and now that I knew what I was looking for, I found it. This one was in the body of the paragraph about the _draug_. I don't know how I missed it, when I read it in the cabin.

_Not everyone regards the draug, or at least all draugs, as malicious spirits. Some have been reported to keep guard over rocky shores, steering lost travelers away from danger._

The last clause was underlined with a blunt line of soot, like someone had drawn it on with a charred stick.

_November 28_

I’ve been sleeping little, needless to say, and when I do, it’s thin and troubled by dreams. 

I have gone down to the beach every day, looking for more bottles, but I’ve not found any.

I don't know what I feel. Hope? Dread? Maybe both.

_December 1_

I dreamed of you last night, Gus. In my dream, we stood on the deck of the _Isbjørn_ , the ship creaking gently with the lapping tide, the crew still asleep. Those long shadows and low sun on the horizon that passes for night in the summer. Gruhuken was laid out as it first was when we first saw, bathed in endless silverly light. You wrapped your arms around me and embraced me. We stood alone on the deck, dead on our feet, each keeping the other upright. We were exhausted, and either one of us would have fallen over on our feet, but together we propped each other up.

I never had these kinds of dreams before. All these years, I didn’t allow myself to. I know it sounds mad, but it’s remarkable what you can repress when you’ve had your whole life to practice. I never dreamed of Gus like that before tonight. I always assumed it would make it more painful, to indulge in dreams.

It is more painful, as it turns out, but I would not trade it for anything.


End file.
